Beautiful Macroportraits of Bees

[Hissyspit]

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/features/140114-bee-native-macro-photography-insects-science/#.UviirXi9LCT





Intimate Portraits of Bees

Researchers take advantage of photography technology developed by the U.S. Army to capture beautiful portraits of bees native to North America.

Photography by Sam Droege, USGS

BEAUTIFUL BEE

Bees are the workhorses of the insect world. By transferring pollen from one plant to another, they ensure the next generation of the fruits, nuts, vegetables, and wildflowers we so enjoy.

There are 4,000 species of North American bees living north of Mexico, says Sam Droege, head of the bee inventory and monitoring program at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

Only 40 of them are introduced species, including the European honeybee. (See “Pictures: Colored Honey Made by Candy-Eating French Bees.”)

Most of the natives are overlooked because “a lot of them are super tiny,” Droege says. “The bulk of the bees in the area are about half the size of a honeybee.”

- snip -

Droege and colleagues began to inventory all the bee species in North America in 2001. This was partly because the insects are so important to the agriculture industry.

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[trusty elf]

1. Gorgeous!

Thanks, Hissyspit.

[countryjake]

2. Thanks for posting these, Hissyspit!

The very end of that article has me laughing and he's so right.


But last fall, Droege got a message from both of his daughters that someone had taken several of the bee pictures from his flickr.com site and posted them to a section of the popular website Reddit.com called woahdude.

“In two days [the post] had 200,000 views,” he says. Normally, Droege can’t get very far at parties once people find out that he studies bees. But now, the “general, general public,” he says, was marveling over the images.

“Once you blow [the bees] up to the size of a German shepherd and they have good hair, people start paying attention,” he says. “They’re like aliens from another world.”

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/features/140114-bee-native-macro-photography-insects-science/#.UviirXi9LCT

[countryjake]

3. kickety

[Hissyspit]

4. Kick

[Solly Mack]

5. Awesome!